Punch was a knockout under Coren's firm hand

Suddenly, it's a week which packs a poignant Punch. Publication of the first dead-cert best-seller anthology for any rich but indecisive Christmas shopper - Helen Walasek's handsomely thorough The Best of Punch Cartoons (Prion, £30) - coincides with Radio 4's mini memorial festival for Alan Coren, who died a year ago this month. Yesterday began the five-part Book of the Week best-of selection of the humourist's vast output, selected by his children, Giles and Victoria, and entitled Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks, and this morning at 11.30 Christopher Matthew, Jeff Cloves and other friends gather at the microphone to pay tribute in Remembering Alan.

Fond reminiscence is at once triggered for a long-ago span of some dozen years or so which I'd almost totally forgotten. For Alan, of course, was to all intents the last indisputably bright-spark editor of Punch and his reign between 1977 and 1988 had me bringing up the rear, doing the honours for sports and pastimes. Laughter was top of the daily news-list all right.

I suppose at times it was a slog, churning out a weekly 2,000-worder for Punch on top of round-the-clock duties for these Guardian pages - but whatever the dateline and deadline, Alan encouraged a warm and clubby fogeyish bonhomie which, however unfashionable, had one straining to make it back to the Punch office for the fabled Friday editorial lunch. For that the drinks bill must have been as massive as the huge, famed deal table which, with ample elbow room, could easily seat 26 - a gaggle of writers at one end, a giggle of cartoonists at the other, and, in between, the occasional one-off, and usually bemused, "celebrity" guest.

Like a prep school desk, the table had been heavily scored since the mag's beginning in 1841 with the chiselled initials of a century-and-a-half of editors, artists, staffers and various lunchers - Thackeray, Garibaldi, Twain, AA Milne, PG Wodehouse, Tenniel, Du Maurier, Bateman, Pont, Fougasse. Once in my time, Prince Charles came to lunch: before we were allowed to sit down, his private detective had to make a quick recce of the room. "My God, sir," he said to Alan when he noticed the hacked-at table top, "you've certainly had some terrible trouble with vandals, haven't you."

Of the sporting cartoons in Walasek's huge new collection of more than 2,000 I'd bet the majority are of cricket; its "Englishness" lends itself to the lampoon. Favourite half-dozen Punch artists of my time there were Tidy, Trog, Larry, Jensen, Dickinson, and ffolkes. Each were fond of cricket. Maestro Bill Tidy is even current president of the Lord's Taverners. Most Friday post-prandials, dear zany Michael 'ffolkes' Davies would take me on to the Wig & Pen club for a "final-final" snifter, once Alan had locked the port away at teatime. One of the framed specials on my wall is Michael's beautiful wispy drawing of an elegant young Regency buck at bat at Hambledon at the turn of the 1800s, with the caption: "He's still nibbling at the outswinger in that corridor of uncertainty."

Cricket happily lends itself to such art and artifice, doesn't it? In this year's Wisden, probably the best and certainly the most prolific of cartooning's moderns, Nick Newman, quotes his favourite - straightfaced surrealist Ed McLachlan's 1970s bird's-eye scene of play held up on an inner-city Test match ground, while on the distant skyline a huge and hungry King Kong-type tyrannosaurus feverishly gobbles up people, churches and buildings. The unseen commentator irritably explains: "And once again we have interruption of play caused by movement behind the bowler's arm."

For old Punch hands, mourning for Alan last October was followed fast and grievously with news of the death in January of the unique Miles Kington. When I joined the mag, Miles was literary editor. On the covers of each of their regular output of books, their separate publishers would trumpet them as "unarguably the funniest writer in England". Genial Miles typically skipped any sparring-partner rivalry and freewheeled off, first to the Times, then the Indie.

Punch in the end, of course, was undone by the accountants, Alan's dreaded "suits". One post-lunch Friday a few of us took up some furiously keen indoor cricket with a tennis ball. A hook shot for six by Alan dislodged a pile of magazines, to draw his quick-as-a-flash commentary: "Hello, a bit of a disturbance among The Spectators, I see!" Then his fierce off-drive toppled a different pile of back-numbers, this time of The Economist, for bowler Miles's immediate touché: "Alan, you've scattered the Suits!"